"The Evolution of Agency"
Follow this thread for highlights from today's seminar by @WiringTheBrain of @trinitycollege. Watch without login on Facebook (we will post the recording to YouTube within 24 hours):
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"The genome doesn't specify the outcome at all; it just encodes the biochemical rules by which development happens."
- @WiringTheBrain on the multi-level interplay of "nature" and "nurture" on #personality
"It's trendy today to deny that #FreeWill is real."
- @WiringTheBrain quotes @SamHarrisOrg & Schopenhauer on the prominence of biological #determinism and neural #reductionism in modern thinking on the nature of choice.
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Ways out of physical and biological #determinism include Cartesian dualism and the compatibilism of SFI/@TuftsUniversity Prof @danieldennett.
"But I think we have to get OVER determinism first, as opposed to just accepting it."
- @WiringTheBrain at SFI:
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"Life is not a state or a property; it's a #process, like a storm, or flame, or tornado. Where a living system differs is in the boundary that makes it into an entity that persists over time."
- @WiringTheBrain on "The #Evolution of #Agency" at SFI today:
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"Life's #purpose is to exist..." and from this emerge the innovations of approach and avoidance, which lead to the emergence of #meaning — which isn't localized in the signals an organism senses, nor in the organism's body, but appear in the interactions.
@WiringTheBrain at SFI:
The evolution of #meaning, from the pragmatic coupling of sense input to motor function, to the #nervoussystem's extraction of high-level representations, decoupling sensory input from action.
Or to put it another way, from reflex to reflection...
@WiringTheBrain at SFI today:
"An exact inversion of the reductionist logic: [biological states] only have causal power because they have #meaning at the level of the organism."
- @WiringTheBrain on how lossy compression in complex systems challenges physical & biological #determinism:
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"As you go up the hierarchy [of organizational complexity], timescales tend to get longer and and cognitive objects more abstract."
- @WiringTheBrain presents a naturalistic model that anchors #meaning & #value in a multilevel process of data aggregation:
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